Suicide District Nickerie · 12 October 2006, 07:02 CET by Charles Vermeulen
When I returned to the Netherlands after a two weeks jouney through Surinam last year, the SLM Boeing offered its passengers an edition of Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, which included a report by Armand Snijders on Nickerie, the Surinam district where I spent most of the time that jouney. The report, entitled ‘Death is Much Loved in Nickerie. Despair Rules in Surinam Polder-District’ (‘De dood is zeer geliefd in Nickerie. Wanhoop regeert in Surinaams polderdistrict’) (14th May, 2005, page 8), outlined a gloomy picture of the district. According to it no fewer than 100 of Nickerie’s 25,000, mainly Hindustani inhabitants made a suicide attempt in 2004. In almost half of the cases an agricultural poison was used. In 20 cases the attempt actually lead to death. This meant that the number of Nickerian suicide attempts was among the highest in the world, ranking third only after those of India and China and being three times higher than the average.
At the time of the publication of Snijders’s report the causes of the high number of suicide attempts were unclear. However, the Hindustani background of the suicides probably played an important role, Snijders stated. Several suicides in which the victims were women occured when ‘dishonor’ was brought to the suicide’s family. This is the case, for example, when an unmarried woman gets pregnant. Furthermore, Snijders mentions arranged marriages and domestic violence as causes of suicide among Nickerian women. Alcoholic excess and unemployment, both related to Nickerie’s struggling, but still vital rice sector, are the main causes of suicide among men. To conclude, the inability of the usually reserved Hindustani Nickerians to communicate about their problems contributed to the high numbers as well.
But Snijders’s report dates from May 2005 and is based on numbers dating from 2004. What is the current situation in Nickerie? Recently Nickerie.net, the ‘Gateway to Nickerie’, reported that Saturday 23rd of September a young man, only 29 years old, hung himself on a tree in his back-yard in the small village of Wageningen, possibly because his parents had urged him to marry. According to Nickerie.net this was the sixteenth suicide in Nickerie in 2006. (Zahier Azizahamad, ‘Zestiende suïcidegeval voor dit jaar in Nickerie’, Nickerie.net, 24th September 2006) This makes 2006 an even more gloomy year than 2004 (1.8 to 1.7 suicides a month respectively). The prospects aren’t good either. A few weeks ago the Surinamese newspaper Dagblad Suriname reported that several small padie farmers in Nickerie have to contend with low yields and that they threaten to burn their fields out of despair. (Santi Sieuw, ‘Situatie in Nickerie zeer dreigend’, Dagblad Suriname, 25th September, 2006)
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